Businesses face many challenges in efficiently tracking information specific to individual products they manufacture. They face additional challenges in making this information available to their consumers, employees and contractors, and in linking individualized product information to the purchaser of the product, especially post-purchase. In today's world of highly customizable and configurable products, it is especially important to understand the options and features of a product that requires follow-up operations. Current methods do not provide a way for manufacturers, retailers, and consumers to effectively monitor, update, and utilize information pertaining to an individual product post-purchase. This creates problems in linking data such as warranty information, product specifications, installation instructions, service information, and consumer information to an individual product and facilitate post-purchase operations, e.g., service, and tracking and processing useful data about product usage and performance.
QR Codes have been used in the past to track things such as vehicle parts during a manufacturing process or provide consumers with generic marketing information about a particular company, product line, or product model. QR Codes have a storage capacity of around 3,000 characters. The design of a QR Code allows for fast decoding which can be done by a number of devices including QR Code readers and other devices adapted to execute QR Code reading applications, e.g., cell phones, tablet computers, and other hand-held computers. A QR Code can be used to store a URL (“uniform resource locator”) that can be read and used to launch web applications on the reader devices. QR Codes also have built in error checking that allows for branding on the QR Code itself.
At present, for consumers (or other interested parties or constituents) to view information about a purchased product and to link to data concerning that product they must manually navigate to a particular website and enter information containing the product's model and serial numbers. This method of accessing and linking product information is inefficient and requires consumers to locate both the model and serial number for a product and then to perform a series of cumbersome data entry operations.
Additionally, most systems for viewing product information and for linking consumers to products they have purchased do not provide information about the specific product purchased. Although discussed in terms of consumers it should be understood that the explanations are exemplary and apply equally to any constituent or interested party, e.g., service technician. Rather, most systems provide general information about a product model or type. Not providing information about the specific product purchased hinders a consumer's ability to make decisions about ordering replacement parts and determining the exact specifications of the product. Also, a consumer that is not able to see information about their specific product will not be able to track the service history for the product and will not be able to see any customizations or modifications that have been done to the product.
Furthermore, systems that do exist do not provide an easy method for other parties, such as installers, field technicians, and customer service representatives to view and modify information pertaining to a specific customer and that customer's product. These parties do not have a system that would allow them to order parts, create service orders, check warranty claims, and view customer information all from one information system. For example, service personnel cannot easily identify necessary measurement or other characteristics of the product which hinders post-purchase support and adds cost at every stage of the process.
Yet another problem faced by installers and field technicians is that they are not able to easily retrieve product specific installation instructions and record any modifications made during installation or repair. There is no system that gives installers and technicians the ability to record all parts ordered and changes made to a product and to further link those changes to a customer's specific product. Technicians and installers also lack the ability to track prior installations and service orders related to a specific customer and that customer's product.
What is needed is a system that allows for easy linking and retrieval of information pertaining to a specific customer and the product purchased by that customer. Ideally this information could also be modified and accessed by parties such as the customer, installers, field technicians, and customer service representatives.
What is also needed is a system that captures post-purchase data related to identified individual products to enable engineering, marketing, servicing, ordering, and other aspects of an enterprise to more effectively market and support its products across a broad and diverse, geographic and otherwise, market.